More searing testimony from Five Omar Mualimm-ak, a prison reform activist who served almost 12 years in prison, over five of them in solitary, “out of sight and invisible to other human beings – and eventually, even to myself,” for “offenses” like having too many postage stamps, eating all an apple, or not eating enough – “refusing to eat.”

“Yet neither a judge nor a jury of my peers handed down this sentence to me. Each of the tormented 23 hours per day that I spent in a bathroom-sized room, without any contact with the outside world, was determined by prison staff…

I never committed one act of violence during my entire sentence. Instead, a series of “tickets”, or disciplinary write-ups for prison rule violations, were punished with a total of more than five years in “the box”.

In New York, guards give out tickets like penny candy… I received an endless stream of tickets, each one more absurd than the last….One day, I ate an entire apple – including the core – because

I was starving for lack of nutrition. I received a ticket for eating the core, since apple seeds contain arsenic, as spelled out in the prison handbook. The next time I received an apple, fearful of another ticket, I simply left it on the tray. I received a ticket for “refusing to eat.”